My wife and I put out seeds to feed the little critters in our courtyard: wrens and juncos, mourning doves, squirrels, chipmunks, now and then a rabbit. This morning a cardinal.
That reminded me of Cardinal Puff, a drinking game we used to play on Okinawa back in 1968; I’ve no idea why that came to mind. I haven’t thought of it in years, decades even, but there the memory was.
This was after Vietnam, but I still had time on my enlistment, so I got sent to Okinawa. Back then, Okinawa for a young enlisted man was something like the armpit of the universe: MPs everywhere, little to do off base but pay too much for drinks and hire prostitutes.
So we just stayed on base, where at the NCO Club, you could drink Heineken beer for 35 cents a pop. We went there every night, night after night after evening chow for three straight months: Fat Pat, Smitty, the Big Swede, and me, stayed each night ’til closing time, and drank to the Cardinal Puff, staggered back to the barracks, and the next night did it again.
It’s what you do, or at least what we did after our little piece of that war was over, and we’d no idea what we’d done or what we were supposed to do with the rest of our lives.
Fifty-eight years later, I’m feeding seeds and nuts to little critters on a cold and snowy winter day, and here’s a cardinal. And I can’t resist the urge to ask out loud: “Is your name Puff?”
W. D. Ehrhart's most recent books are a 2025 collection of poems, Smart Fish Don't Bite from Moonstone Arts, and Getting Shot At: Essays on War, Conflict & Culture Clash, forthcoming in 2026 from McFarland & Company, Inc. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wales at Swansea and taught English and history at The Haverford School in Pennsylvania from 2001 to 2019.
